屈原 離騷 translation: An extract from 'The Sorrow of Parting'', by Qu Yuan'

Happy Dragon Boat Festival! Seeing as today’s festivities are all about commemorating the poet 屈原 (Qu Yuan), it seems appropriate to have a look at a poem that is usually attributed to him: 離騷 (Lí Sāo) - The Sorrow of Parting.

The whole poem is 372 lines long, of which I’m annotating just eight (the full original text is available here). This extract has particular significance for me because it’s the source of my Chinese name, 脩遠 (Xiūyuǎn; usually I just write it as 修远).

Notes

縣 in the second line is 懸 (xuán), meaning “hanging”; 縣圃 refers to the mythical hanging gardens in the Kunlun Mountains.

瑣 in the third line is 藪 (sǒu), which means both “gathering place” and “marsh”.

羲和 - Wikipedia”) is a Chinese goddess who rides the sun like a chariot (she’s also described as the mother of the ten suns in Chinese folklore). 節 here is 按節, meaning to stop a horse or chariot by pulling on the reins.

崦 and 嵫 are both mountains in modern Gansu province.

The part that my name comes from, 脩遠, is something like “distant cultivation”, as in a never ending journey. 脩 also means “to cultivate” or “to study”, so I take the name to mean “a never ending journey of self-cultivation”. Go me.